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Ion, a company well known for its USB turntables and iCade arcade cabinet for iPad, recently released a photo and film "scanner" accessory for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S called the iPics2Go. The $50 device is little more than a black plastic box with some LEDs inside, a slot for 4x6" photos, and a carrier for 35mm negatives and slides, but together with a free companion app, iPics2Go makes it simple to get old photos onto your iPhone for easy manipulation, editing, and posting online.

We got a sample of the iPics2Go to test out, and found that while its simple design has some flaws, it is easy to use and makes working old analog photos into our digital social network a breeze.

iPhone: where my pictures live

I freely admit I'm an "iPhoneography" fiend. I have a collection of DSLR equipment I can use whenever I want, but these days I rarely have the need for the image quality and resolution they provide at the cost of bulk and weight. I stopped using my long-cherished Canon digital point-n-shoot after upgrading from an iPhone 3G to an iPhone 4 well over two years ago. I still take hundreds of pictures a month, as I did with my trusty Canon, but the vast majority are taken with my iPhone.

Before going digital in 2003, though, I had a vast array of analog 35mm and medium format gear. I may not have been quite as prodigious then as I am now—after all, every shutter press cost real money in terms of film, processing, printing, scanning, and storage—but I do have a sizable collection of images taken roughly between 1992 and 2003 that only exist as stacks of 4" prints or strips of acetate. I could use a professional flatbed scanner to get high quality, high-resolution scans of the prints, negatives, or slides, but for the kind of quick and casual sharing I do with a lot of snaps, that can sometimes be more trouble than it's worth.

Instead, I've often wished there was a good way to just snap a picture of an existing print with my iPhone and then share it via Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr. I mean, you can lay a print on a flat surface and hover your iPhone over it, but it's a real challenge to get even lighting, avoid glare, and at the same time hold the iPhone perfectly parallel to minimize distortion. Doing the same thing with negatives or slides is, as far as I can tell, impractical to the point of impossibility.

Ion to the rescue

So, at CES 2012 in January, I was amazed when I saw a prototype of Ion's iPics2Go gadget. It's an alternate take on the company's Pics2PC scanners, which use fixed digital camera sensors to scan old photos and film and quickly transfer them to a Mac or PC. However, instead of including camera hardware, iPics2Go substitutes a user's iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S. Your iPhone's built-in camera hardware does all the "scanning," and from there you can do anything you would do with any other photo: edit in apps like Camera Plus Pro or SnapSeed, make collages with Diptic or Pic Stitch, or upload to social networks like Facebook or Twitter.

Enlarge/ Here's a shot of Me First and the Gimme Gimmes at Deer Creek Music Center, Warped Tour 2001. I used iPics2Go to "scan" it into my iPhone 4.

Chris Foresman

Using the iPics2Go is fairly easy. Insert a 4x6" print into the print tray and slide it into the slot at the bottom. Push the power button, which lights up an array of 6 bright white LEDs, powered by 4 included AA batteries. Then lay your iPhone into the slot at the top, launch the iPics2Go app, select "4x6," tap the shutter button, and voila! You've just scanned an old photo into your iPhone.

The iPics2Go app isn't strictly necessary if you're just snapping 4x6" prints. The shape and design places the iPhone camera at just the right position and distance to fully capture a 4x6" print. However, if you flip over the print tray, the device now works with the smaller 3x5" prints that were more popular in the 70s and 80s. The iPics2Go app can automatically crop for 3x5" prints when selected.

The iPics2Go also comes with a 35mm film carrier, which can take a 4-5 frame strip of negatives, or a mounted 35mm slide. Selecting either of these options in iPics2Go crops the nominal 24x36mm 35mm frame area, and for negative film automatically reverses the image into a positive on capture.

Enlarge/ A carrier allows the iPics2Go to "scan" 35mm slides or negatives into an iPhone, too.

Chris Foresman

Additionally, the iPics2Go app applies a bit of automatic image optimization, and then gives you the opportunity to adjust the image further. I found that it consistently produced low contrast images from negatives, added too much contrast to images from slides, and gave images from prints a yellow tint. Since the effects were consistent, after a bit of experience I was able to easily correct these "optimizations" using iPics2Go's simple sliders. More exacting photogs will likely want to pass the images through an editor such as Snapseed, Photoshop Touch, or whatever other application fits their workflow.

Enlarge/ The iPics2Go app applies a little "optimization" to images, which you can tweak before saving.

Enlarge/ Scans from prints look good (left), but lack dynamic range and show surface defects like dust or scratches. Scans from negatives (right) have much more dynamic range, but tend to look quite flat without some editing.

iPics2Go lets you save the image to your iPhone's photo roll, but can also e-mail photos or upload them to Facebook directly. These functions work exactly as expected, though I prefer to save the images and share them via other means. This has the added benefit of keeping the original capture around for future use, and the images get archived on my Mac whenever I sync the device (the same will be true if you use PhotoStream along with iPhoto over iCloud).

Overall, the iPics2Go device and the iPics2Go app generally work well. The device's plastic feels a bit cheap, but it also feels solid—there really isn't much of anything to break. I had a lot of fun digging up some old photos to try it out. However, it does have some problems that are worth noting. For one, the LEDs are arranged with three on the left and three on the right, which creates an area in the middle of prints that can be visibly darker than the edges. This was only noticeable in one of the images I scanned, but it really bothered me. Getting more even lighting might have required more LEDs or a change in the internal design, but for $50, it would have been nice.

Enlarge/ This image quite clearly shows the uneven lighting problem caused by the placement of the LEDs inside the iPics2Go. Fortunately, in most images it wasn't anywhere near this noticeable.

Chris Foresman, 1996

Another problem is that the frame alignment of the film carrier was off—not by a lot, but it was bothersome. I tried inserting the carrier different ways to offset the problem, but the carrier is designed to only insert one way. Given this, it feels as though more design time could have been spent ensuring the frame aligned better with the crop marks in the app. In fact, it seems like allowing the cropping guide to be moved around in the iPics2Go app would be a pretty easy fix (hint hint!).

Enlarge/ The film carrier offsets the frame significantly relative to the fixed frame in the iPics2Go app. You can pinch and zoom to get more play, but this will end up cropping your image significantly.

Finally, the film carrier is designed for both negatives and prints, but the way that negatives are inserted and the carrier's design left me nervous that the delicate film could end up scratched. I didn't notice any scratches after using it, but I was extremely careful to avoid doing so. I've seen film carriers for other scanners that used a soft felt or velvet inside; again, for the $50 asking price, that little extra touch would have been nice.

The film carrier is just hard plastic on the inside, which seems likely to scratch irreplaceable negatives if you're not very careful.

Chris Foresman

I ultimately had a lot of fun digging up old band photos from Warped Tour, high school dance photos, a quick portrait I snapped of a friend when his now 16-year-old son was just an infant, and even a revealing senior portrait of yours truly (the early '90s were a magical time, were they not?).

Using the iPics2Go is a lot less hassle than firing up a flatbed scanner. It works pretty much anywhere—you can take it to mom's house and go through old albums!—and you can use your own comfortable or convenient array of "iPhoneography" apps with all your scans. We also know that a significant amount of people don't have regular access to a desktop or laptop computer, and that sometimes an iOS or Android device might be their only computing device. If this is true for you, and you have an iPhone 4 or 4S, then the iPics2Go might be the only convenient way to save old photos.

Suggested retail for the iPics2Go is a steep $59.99, though Ion wisely sells it direct for $49.99. We found it on Amazon for $41.99, and at that price we think it will pay for itself pretty quickly in terms of fun and convenience. Do note that it only works with the iPhone 4 and 4S. Those are by far the most plentiful iPhone models sold to date, but there are plenty of 3GS owners out there who are getting left out.

I'd really like to digitize my photo collection and am constantly shocked at the complete lack of solutions out there. All I'm really looking for is a decent scanner with an automatic document feeder (but most ADFs choke on pictures in the 4x6 range...)

I don't think this scanner fixes that issue any (and seems to produce worse outputs).

It's too bad. I think there's a market for it, honestly. Pictures are the one thing I can't replace if my house burns down. It would be awesome to have them all digital and backed up for the rest of days. Maybe I need to get over being a digital pack rat?

Bought something similar for my wife for xmas. She has tens of thousands of photos and 35mm film about. She loves it. She doesn't like the overall quality. But 30gigs of imagery organized and saved on our fileserver and backed up offsite is a lot better than the crappy boxes in the closet.

My 100 dollar flatbed scanner does 4 pics at a time, automatically cutting and cropping individual photos. It does it pretty fast, with excellent color and even illumination, at high dpi. If you are going to buy hardware, seems an extra 50 dollars for a proper scanner is worth it.

My 100 dollar flatbed scanner does 4 pics at a time, automatically cutting and cropping individual photos. It does it pretty fast, with excellent color and even illumination, at high dpi. If you are going to buy hardware, seems an extra 50 dollars for a proper scanner is worth it.

I agree. We have a decent Epson that my wife spent the better part of a year organizing and digitizing her family picture collection which was several thousand photos and several thousand slides. Insanely time consuming, but having a full scanner with some basic clean up and calibration tools makes a big difference. The main issue we run into is with iphoto not playing nice with the 70gb library.

With that said, I can understand the novelty and fun associated with this if you aren't looking for long term or archival solution.

Also, good article and write up. Good balance of pro/con and pictures. Nice job Chris.

My 100 dollar flatbed scanner does 4 pics at a time, automatically cutting and cropping individual photos. It does it pretty fast, with excellent color and even illumination, at high dpi. If you are going to buy hardware, seems an extra 50 dollars for a proper scanner is worth it.

I agree if prints are your only concern, that a $100 flatbed would be a better solution, especially if your goal is to scan and archive every photo. If you need to scan negatives and slides, however, you'll probably be spending closer to $300-400 on the low end for a decent flatbed that can also do negatives and transparencies.

The iPics2Go is much smaller; easier to tuck away on a shelf, and pull out when you need/want it. Also as I mentioned, it's very portable, so you could take over to a friend or relative's house and capture some images from them pretty easily. It doesn't need a host computer; that may be a consideration/convenience for some users. And I would definitely classify it as more of a casual use device and less of a professional device.

My 100 dollar flatbed scanner does 4 pics at a time, automatically cutting and cropping individual photos. It does it pretty fast, with excellent color and even illumination, at high dpi. If you are going to buy hardware, seems an extra 50 dollars for a proper scanner is worth it.

Except there are numerous reasons why this might be better. Transportability (I wouldn't want to throw even a small flatbed scanner in my carry-on luggage), ease of use, lack of computer handy, et cetera. At this point, I take and edit more photos in my phone than I do with my Canon 7D. Obviously I love my dSLR, but with the exception of paid jobs, it seems silly to pull it out these days.

foresmac108 wrote:

Xepherys wrote:

If they made an insert for 120 negatives, AND it wasn't scratchy hard plastic, I would buy this in a heartbeat.

I agree, it wouldn't be hard to add another slot to hold 120 film, but the carrier should be a little better engineered.

Having spent 5+ minutes turning on and off lights to find a position that eliminates glare, adjusting the angle I hold my iPhone to eliminate skew and reviewing multiple failed attempts to get a clear, square image of a picture or anything glossy, iPics2Go looks like a relatively good value.

One benefit of this over a $100 flatbed scanner is cutting out the workflow step of firing up the scanner and computer it is connected to and then transferring the resulting image to your iPhone, assuming that is where you want it in the first place (i.e. for sharing with friends in casual settings). The ability to scan negatives, albeit with great care to avoid damage, is a bonus.

If you have all that SLR equipment lying around, why not get a small light box and use your existing DSLR and macro lens to digitize the pictures? Quality is going to be much better, not just noise but also dynamic range. Plus, you have a lot more control.

iPhones are awesome for many tasks, but digitizing slides and other analog pictures just isn't one of them.

If you have all that SLR equipment lying around, why not get a small light box and use your existing DSLR and macro lens to digitize the pictures? Quality is going to be much better, not just noise but also dynamic range. Plus, you have a lot more control.

iPhones are awesome for many tasks, but digitizing slides and other analog pictures just isn't one of them.

I just don't agree - at least not all the time. I don't always need an 18MP RAW image to work from when reimaging old photos or slides. Sometimes I just want something to text to my mom or post to Facebook. In fact, that's the vast majority of my photos these days. I also have editing tools on my phone and iPad that are indespensible photo editors, doing in 2-3 steps what I can only script in 5-8 steps in Photoshop or Lightroom.

I agree if prints are your only concern, that a $100 flatbed would be a better solution, especially if your goal is to scan and archive every photo. If you need to scan negatives and slides, however, you'll probably be spending closer to $300-400 on the low end for a decent flatbed that can also do negatives and transparencies.

I've embarked on a large project to digitize my family's extensive photographic record which includes plenty of negatives and slide film. I've been using Canon's 9000F flatbed scanner. At ~$150 currently, it can scan negatives including large medium format sizes at up to 9600dpi (seriously overkill, but it can) with infrared dust and scratch removal. The software can scan, crop, and save 10 frames of 35mm film at a time. I can also carefully dial in the color adjustment for different film emulsions.

What I'm saying is, there's no way around it; projects like these are painfully tedious and it's prudent to make sure you only have to do it once. This method might be suitable for making a quick copy to share on Facebook and pass the phone around the table at Thanksgiving, but I'm unconvinced it's the best choice when making an archive or digital replacement for the original that may one day be the only copy. We are, after all, planning for the inevitability that the original will eventually be lost or destroyed.

Interestingly, contraptions like this aren't new. Here's one meant to assist in transferring your memories to video tape. While you can point a home movie projector at it and convert movies, it also has a mechanism for transferring stills. Why anyone would want a low resolution video of their photos, I don't know, but there it is.

I've embarked on a large project to digitize my family's extensive photographic record which includes plenty of negatives and slide film. I've been using Canon's 9000F flatbed scanner. At ~$150 currently, it can scan negatives including large medium format sizes at up to 9600dpi (seriously overkill, but it can) with infrared dust and scratch removal. The software can scan, crop, and save 10 frames of 35mm film at a time. I can also carefully dial in the color adjustment for different film emulsions.

How is the quality on the negatives? I have a ton of old negatives and the ability to scan 10 at a time would be a huge time saver.

Is there no service where you drop/courier you total collection to someone with the high end equipment and automated workflow and they dump the lot back to you on DVDs (or hard drives if you have that much)

Obviously this means putting your collection outside of your control for a while which may be unnerving, or flat out impossible perhaps but it strikes me as a more useful solution for most people if they are no longer taking new images.

If you're in a major city I would expect there to be several drop in and collect services, at which point the only limitation is if you can't afford to let other people see the photos...

I see UK places online where, from print scans at 600DPI from compeltely unsorted collections are in the order of 50 quid for 400 photos. Obviously going up in bulk makes it cheaper. If you're doing more than that your time has to be pretty worthless for it still not to work out cheaper getting someone else to do it.

Is there no service where you drop/courier you total collection to someone with the high end equipment and automated workflow and they dump the lot back to you on DVDs (or hard drives if you have that much)

Obviously this means putting your collection outside of your control for a while which may be unnerving, or flat out impossible perhaps but it strikes me as a more useful solution for most people if they are no longer taking new images.

I actually looked into this recently, and even in the Chicago area, a lot of places farm this out to some type of centralized lab. It's also quite expensive. I'd absolutely love to pay someone else to do it—there's a reason I've been putting it off for a decade—but a nice, high-end scanner is like $400, and about 1/10 of the cost it would be to have someone else do all the work.

I've embarked on a large project to digitize my family's extensive photographic record which includes plenty of negatives and slide film. I've been using Canon's 9000F flatbed scanner. At ~$150 currently, it can scan negatives including large medium format sizes at up to 9600dpi (seriously overkill, but it can) with infrared dust and scratch removal. The software can scan, crop, and save 10 frames of 35mm film at a time. I can also carefully dial in the color adjustment for different film emulsions.

How is the quality on the negatives? I have a ton of old negatives and the ability to scan 10 at a time would be a huge time saver.

Also, does it handle slides? Or only transparent films that can lay flat against the scanning bed? My dad has been bugging me for a bit about scanning in old photos and slides, I've kept one eye on the issue but wasn't sure whether to get separate scanners, or one that could do both.

Interestingly, contraptions like this aren't new. Here's one meant to assist in transferring your memories to video tape. While you can point a home movie projector at it and convert movies, it also has a mechanism for transferring stills. Why anyone would want a low resolution video of their photos, I don't know, but there it is.

Getting videos—and later, DVD slide shows—of images was a super popular service at the camera shop I worked at back home for a good long while. At one point throughout the late 90s, we had a dedicated set up and a high school kid who came in every afternoon and all day Saturday, and just made these videos of old photos.

Is there no service where you drop/courier you total collection to someone with the high end equipment and automated workflow and they dump the lot back to you on DVDs (or hard drives if you have that much)

Obviously this means putting your collection outside of your control for a while which may be unnerving, or flat out impossible perhaps but it strikes me as a more useful solution for most people if they are no longer taking new images.

I actually looked into this recently, and even in the Chicago area, a lot of places farm this out to some type of centralized lab. It's also quite expensive. I'd absolutely love to pay someone else to do it—there's a reason I've been putting it off for a decade—but a nice, high-end scanner is like $400, and about 1/10 of the cost it would be to have someone else do all the work.

As others have mentioned, it's just a tedious task.

Well, and it also seems that if you're going to commit the time or money to do so, the major benefit of doing it yourself is that you can also catalog/label/organize things in a way that makes sense for your collection. All anyone else can do is throw a bunch of jpgs in a folder.

I just can't seeing anyone having a need for this. Most don't carry 4x6 prints, or any prints for that matter. If you're going to digitize your collection, a scanner makes far better sense.

I don't this it's the best solution for digitizing an entire collection, unless you're among the few for which a mobile device like an iPhone is your only "computer" of any kind. That niche is small but growing.

I think it's really great for when, like recently, I discovered a cache of old high school dance photos, and posted each and every one of them to Instagram and Facebook. I got tons and tons of likes and favorites from those photos from all my high school friends, many of whom had long tossed most of the photos.

Chris, I think I speak for everyone in the thread when I ask you....Dude, what the HELL were you wearing? heh

A two piece, 100% polyester jumpsuit I purloined from the aging collection of clothing at the Harrison High School Drama Department. We never used most the stuff since it was largely from the 60s and 70s, but when I was there we would dress up in outfits we put together from the collection when we had cast parties. This was one of them.

I became particularly well-known when I later transferred to a different high school for wearing this and other "disco" outfits to school, and performing to various disco hits in the commons area during lunch. I'm pretty sure there's at least one picture of me in this outfit in the 1993-94 yearbook (I've been told this, but I don't actually have my own copy.)

How is the quality on the negatives? I have a ton of old negatives and the ability to scan 10 at a time would be a huge time saver.

I quality of the scan is good. It's typical for the resolution of the scan to exceed the spatial resolution of the recorded photograph. Dynamic range is easily preserved, especially if you use multiple exposure scanning. Quality of the color is dependent on your settings.

I should add that while the included 35mm template, when used, can accommodate 10 35mm frames at a time, most of the time you can only scan 8 or so because of the film being typically trimmed by the photoprocessor into strips of 4.

ClownRazer wrote:

Also, does it handle slides? Or only transparent films that can lay flat against the scanning bed? My dad has been bugging me for a bit about scanning in old photos and slides, I've kept one eye on the issue but wasn't sure whether to get separate scanners, or one that could do both.

It has a template for holding mounted slide film. The quality was good, but care had to be taken to deal with dust and fiber intrusion from the old cardboard frames. It was more difficult cleaning the slide film because the dust would get caught at the edges and corners of the frame.

I'll note that you don't have to use the plastic templates. While they're nice to use, sometimes you can't due to unusual film size or other issues. I stole some plate glass from a photo frame to hold the film flat and did away with the templates altogether when I came up against 126 film and 35mm that was so badly curled that I was getting excessive newton rings when using the templates.

Is there no service where you drop/courier you total collection to someone with the high end equipment and automated workflow and they dump the lot back to you on DVDs (or hard drives if you have that much)

Obviously this means putting your collection outside of your control for a while which may be unnerving, or flat out impossible perhaps but it strikes me as a more useful solution for most people if they are no longer taking new images.

I actually looked into this recently, and even in the Chicago area, a lot of places farm this out to some type of centralized lab. It's also quite expensive. I'd absolutely love to pay someone else to do it—there's a reason I've been putting it off for a decade—but a nice, high-end scanner is like $400, and about 1/10 of the cost it would be to have someone else do all the work.

As others have mentioned, it's just a tedious task.

I have looked around and there are a few online places - e.g. www.scanmyphotos.com charges $220 to scan a box of 4x6 photos @ 300dpi (according to them ~1,800 photos).